This Book Reveals Our Lives in Motion, On the Loose: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's Working Class Represent

I have heard that comedians are our modern philosophers. I have heard, too, that this is true of poets, the keepers of thought and inquiry, practitioners a sort of observation that could only belong to a writer. In Working Class Represent, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, however, transcends these categories — comedian and poet — as she is both. She surveys the way in which our lives may sometimes take sad and misshapen shapes, and creates these shapes anew while also keeping her good humor on display, showing that is possible to at once grimace, smile and even laugh.

With titles like “I’m Too Sexy for This Office” and “Dear Whoever is Sending Pictures to My Phone” and “Poem Written on Cold Medication,” Aptowicz wields her wit like a sword. And then there are other kinds of poems: “Heart Sweater,” “Close Out Sale” and “Disconnected,” there is an underlying loneliness, as if Aptowicz is turning to words to speak of her experiences because words are all she has. In “Disconnected,” she asks: “What did artists do before the internet?” Without poetic reservation, she replies:

Created their art, I suppose. Or cleaned their bathtubs,
cooked their meals, went to war, wrote and mailed
actual letters, rattled in their beds with consumption,
drank until dizzy, made love until dawn, or maybe
they did even simpler things: just stole outside
and sucked in the fresh blue-black night air to marvel
at the persistence of our bright, dumb moon, to stumble
tipsy into the path of an old lover, to stop and smile,
and to apologize, before stepping out of the way
and moving on.

Or instead, look at “Sexton and Plath,” a poem that considers the way in which female wordsmiths have “ripped life from their mouths on purpose,” who have committed suicide. She writes of “what it means to be woman and poet, the long beautiful death of it.” Then, as if turning some kind of funny and curious switch, Aptowicz gives us “Ode to College Cafeterias.” She says, “They say that your college years are the best years of your life. Don’t believe it. . . . But I will give you this: you will never again be exposed to so many awesome cafeteria options.”

And this rumination on modern-day eateries, of course, is how she follows the thread back to where she is now, a worker, one more in a million with a day job, back to us. With grace, she laments, and also cautions: “For one day you too, will be 25 years old drinking coffee you paid for and made yourself, staring into your bowl of Special K and thinking . . . I can’t believe it’s 8am and I can’t just pour some fresh soft serve ice cream on this tasty bitch.”

Now, I must confess: for a long time I didn’t know Aptowicz wrote her poems down. I had always only listened, even watched. She’s a hero of the slam circuit, after all. She can hold an audience like they are the lines on her palm, talk to a room like it’s dying.

Nevertheless, I can hear her voice ringing even on the page. In Working Class Represent, Aptowicz’s strength is that she uses accessible language to say what no one else can. She navigates the world of labor and modernity with fierce conviction, all the while questioning all that lies before her. She writes of a familiar place — New York as we see it today — and yet under her lens the mundane becomes foreign, even wild. Yes, this book reveals our lives in motion, on the loose. Simply put, if the world is a question then Aptowicz has the answer. And luckily, like our greatest explorers, she has written it all down.

What It Is Like To Be Alive In This World: A Review of Matt Hart's Wolf Face

Whoa. So here we are, human beings. “Sing it, We are human beings.” We are lying, cannibalistic husbands and wives. Wolf Face howls the hard truth into us, and then invites us into a home to care for a crying baby. “Bathing in purple, we are bathing in O. / The violets are brewing,” and if you don’t already know, you missed a hell of a book in 2010.

As a poet hanging out with poets in the real world, I’ve come to know “meaning” as a bit of a problem word. A blurb from Darcie Dennigan on the back of Wolf Face says that this “record of what it is like to be alive in this world” is “particular to one man.” That’s probably true, but I think that this is a book about Matt Hart living with Matt Hart in the real world. Which is to say, this book is about a universal experience.

Looking for meaning in these pages, a reader runs the risk of running into a wallpaper wall. Things are what they say, until they give way to something more expansive. Hart writes: “It isn’t necessary that life seem meaningful at every turn, / only that it mean something in the face of you.” Wolf Face is filled to the brim with things that “mean” for Matt Hart. We visit the poet when he is thirty-nine, thirty-six, when he’s married and when he’s meeting his wife. We visit him when he’s paying a mortgage and when he’s renting 434 Grad Avenue, Apt. 4 in Brooklyn. We see him pulling on a few very different faces, each entirely genuine.

The handsome cover design invites us into a very personal space right off the bat. Right at the bottom, plain as day, Hart displays four lines of a type-written draft of the titular poem, pen-marked, scribbled-out, and re-written. “Alive with a terror that blends in the snow” is re-molded into “Alive with an error that shakes in the snow,” the line that appears in the book. More terrifying than “terror,” the revision speaks to the way that these poems mean.

Wolf Face has a remarkable range, evidenced by titles like “Matt Hart Running with Daisy, His Dog” and “I Gave Away the Sky,” each magnificently different in scope and plausibility. But we’re not just reading from one Matt Hart, either. He’s thirty-six and thirty-nine. He wears a “Wolf Face” and an “Electron Face.” All of this is to say that the scope of plausibility in this book transcends the routine, the memory and the domestic by inhabiting those spaces wildly. The book transcends the wild by being it, by carrying on an honestly primal existence through meticulously-constructed poems that rage while they calm, and vice-versa.

This is a hell of a book. You have to turn it sideways to read it. No joke. But when you do, you’ll figure out that coming at things sideways is the best way to get to the genuine. Let this book eat you — you’ll survive. You’re human.

Melissa Broder On Reading

I am a very hungry and thirsty girl.

I have an infinite god-shaped hole inside.

I want to be sated and de-thirsted 24 hours a day.

If I can’t be sated and de-thirsted 24 hours a day I want to be lifted up out of my body so I don’t have to feel anything or so I can feel only euphoric.

Sometimes poetry does one of these things for me: sates or de-thirsts or lifts.

I read my first poems at six.

I wrote my first poems at eight.

I have since tried many other ways to fill the god-shaped hole, but poetry is one of the safest ways I know how.

The main consequence of reading poetry, for me, is writing poetry.

This Is Free Verse At Its Finest: A Review of Amy King's Slaves To Do These Things

The title of Ms. King’s most recent collection of poems never fails to evoke sentences uttered by women I grew up with, usually spoken while they toiled at women’s work, sentences beginning with “I wish we had” or “We should have.”  But these poems have little to do with women’s work or America’s shameful past (or present), except obliquely.  One could say, confronted by the intentional queering of their language, that they have little to do with anything, except obliquely, but somehow, by some poetic alchemy, using this skewed approach, King’s poems end up having to do with everything: the culture wars, Brooklyn, our sham economy, ecology, our actual wars, fashion, sex, patriarchy, food, God, loving a woman as a woman in the middle of this whacked milieu, none of them simply about any one thing, all of them managing, like a kaleidescope, to make a pattern of some fragmented vision glancing through a mixture of themes.

Upon first reading them I found myself disoriented, and, I confess, a little spooked. How’d she get in my head like that? Her syntax performs a mimesis of the subconscious. Sentences jump ship midstream. The epigraph for the book, from Baudelaire, is a clue that we’re in for a wild ride: get ready for dreamtime. The dream comes to us in the form of a five-act play. Each act has an epigraph: a poem title or phrase, the attributions of which are listed at the end of the book (adding to the sense of mystery that pervades it), which casts its spell over the poems in that act and encourages a perception of narrative arc or progression, despite the uncertainty the reader may feel at the end of any particular poem as to whether she has grasped anything more than her own shadow.

My ability to receive the meaning embedded within these poems varies according to my willingness to walk in the dark. Sometimes I get nowhere, and sometimes I get to the end and they make total sense. But even on the days when I find them opaque, they give pleasure. By King’s admission, these poems underwent more conscious polishing than her previous collections. The language is crisp in the mouth and often downright fun to say. She uses every tool in the poet’s toolbox except regular end rhyme. This is free verse at its finest. And on the days they do make sense, when like a jeweled puzzle box something clicks, opens, and is revealed, I feel myself in the company of a thinking, caring, feeling human being who grasps the world’s ugliness, grapples with its demons, transcends her limited identity, and still manages to engage the beauty of a tulip and find herself, with her lover, happy. Such a presence is good company, indeed.

To enjoy the speaker’s journey it’s not necessary to realize that the book was written during a protracted illness — the course of the journey, of descent and resurfacing, is archetypal — but it does help explain a poem like “You Believe in Everything,” in Act IV, which seems to be about the speaker, apparently not as recovered as she’d hoped, having trouble holding her food down, out late at a cocktail party. Of course, like the rest of the poems, this one is not really about its surface narrative and ends: “There. Now you’ve / subsumed just how much / I love the way you tune. / Allah, creeps, amen.” The fact that King is a lesbian is another aspect of her umwelt and aids in the attempt at semiosis with her poems. The way she herself imagines her way into the umwelt of the Other in her attempts to understand those who hate her renders her perception of the world universal. One gets the feeling, as one does with the best of poets, that King has tapped in to that part of herself, her ground of being, which she shares with all of life. As mystics have always reported, this leaves one, “happy, in fact” (the final words of the final poem, “We Are Great Songs”).

But enlightenment is a moment-to-moment enterprise, and saddled with these bodies and all their attributes, sometimes bedridden, sometimes confronted with irrational hatred of one’s simple being, it can feel like serious work. She closes the first poem of the fifth act, “Anarchy’s Tiptoe,” like so: “Enclosed in this forgotten basement, / the galaxy is an awfully big place, / and I am still feeling/the walks between steps, / drowning in part, / footed forever with this forever / project of waking up.” Indeed that is the biggest project, one that might be the most worthwhile project a human being can “foot.” And one that leaves the idea of “slaves to do these things,” or anything that would deny anyone their human rights, unthinkable. Good books help us wake up to that which is best in ourselves; this is one of them.

Fear: Uniting the Surreal and the Real

Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen’s first book of translated poems, The World Cut Out With Crooked Scissors, prepared me for his style of writing — the surreal prose poem focused on minute things or instances — but the subjects were much broader in the 2007 collection than in 2011’s House Inspections, assumedly because it was an amassing of selected poems from, at the time, nearly two decades of work. House Inspections is a continuation of his style, but with a much more focused subject, and it’s in this honing that the fear is clarified.

Translated by David Keplinger (just as with Crooked Scissors), House Inspections defies the question, “What’s it about?” just as much surrealist poetry does — however, here, I noticed a trend when I tried answering this question, asked by a friend as I read while he played a Final Fantasy. It’s about a town — no, it’s more about a specific block — well, I guess it’s just one house. No, it’s about a room. No, a table. No, a plate. No, the absence of anything in a room, and the absence of a room, and a house, and other houses, and a city. The impact of these poems relies not only on the appearance of unique imagery, but the disappearance of it as well. Take for example the poem “Mail”:

“After an acquaintance remarked that a certain, newly erected building looks like a piece of set design, the mailman, more and more, has entertained the possibility that there’s nothing on the other side of the house fronts, no floors either, but that the letters, as soon as they have disappeared through the letter flaps, continue their fall downwards, whirling through an all-engulfing darkness.”

The fact that the building’s falsity infects even the ground it stands on, turning it into a void, shows how these poems subtly move beyond pointless absurdity. The absence provides depth.

Not all things missing are literal. In the titular poem, policemen pore over the minutiae of various houses, asking, “And what’s the trouble here?” The repetition implies that there istrouble to be found, and their inability to find it puzzles them, so they ask one another, “What is the trouble here?” The answer never appears, just as their purpose never appears — something one could ask of authority figures in many instances where they attend to trivial or harmless situations. After reading this poem, my mind leapt to the time when I was 13 and was yelled at for riding my bicycle on an empty sidewalk. Such personal reminders, connected to our emotional reactions of the poems (and in the case of House Inspections, the common, nearly constant reaction was fear), are what give surreal poetry its power and prevent it from simply being silly nonsense.

Some Can Channel these Demons Better than Others

What makes Dennis Mahagin run? Run, as in jet engine propelling tons of steel down a runway and up into the sky. From his opening poem, “Grand Mal w/ Grown Up,” it’s clear things are out on the table:

“Back then there was Grandma, / stuffing your thoughtless pie hole / with a freshly-bought / Ivory soap cake, / after you popped off / to your impressionable siblings / at breakfast, a wisecrack / about the sweet / peach ridge panty cleft / on February’s / Sports Illustrated / swimsuit cover model— / . . . ”

Grand Mal can be frantic, it’s often funny, often strung out, yet the craft here never wavers. The poems hang together the way a talented musician knows to assemble dissonant chords, making them something powerful and profound that will move people, provided it’s done without strain or artifice. For many years Mahagin was a bass player and songwriter — no surprise! Music punches up each of his fractured poetic lines, so when they coalesce into lyrical scenes they move and shout and lament from that deep well in the land of the down and out: the almost dead; or dead for all practical purposes.

So why Grand Mal? Medically speaking, a grand mal seizure is characterized by 4 phases (there’s an epigraph — quoted from the Epilepsy Foundation of America– explaining each Phase, as it delineates the book’s 4 sections).

Mahagin writes in “Banishing the Snakes”:

“It’s a go-fast world, and green / is the color of my disease— / . . .  / I’ve done that / Riverdance sidestep, / caught the flak of dripping fang / that makes you so dreadful sick; / and I can tell you: no driftwood / wishbone stabbing stick at arms length / will work on this bitch it’s strictly up / close and personal, under your thumb / in a fire nozzle grip, until she opens wide, / blasting poison like syphilis piss / on a slush bank . . .” (from Phase 1).

Sub-dividing the book in this way allows the poems a forward momentum that tightens narrative tension, while at the same time maintaining the seizure as its driving metaphor. He writes in “Fare”:

“The Laotian impresario / at the outcall agency / recommended her / as a star in his stable: / “She go slow— she so / con-sooo-mate . . . pro.” / Now, as she slips on / the glistening condom / with her mouth / in a frisson of python, he bats back / the eyelid splash of rushing purple dusk / . . . ” (from Phase 2).

So what makes Mahagin run? Perhaps the demons of his past, present, and the always uncertain future, which is part and parcel of what makes poetry such a compelling art form. Some can channel these demons better than others. Mahagin puts it transparently out there, saying to anyone who happens to amble by, for a read:

“Stuff they give / to empty you / out, / makes sleep / tough, / getting up / to go, crapper / to sack , and back / . . . ” from “Endoscopy” (Phase 4).

Grand Mal is the second book by this prolific poet. I eagerly anticipate more. What makes Dennis Mahagin run? Run, as in jet engine propelling tons of steel down a runway and up into the sky. From his opening poem, “Grand Mal w/ Grown Up,” it’s clear things are out on the table:

“Back then there was Grandma, / stuffing your thoughtless pie hole / with a freshly-bought / Ivory soap cake, / after you popped off / to your impressionable siblings / at breakfast, a wisecrack / about the sweet / peach ridge panty cleft / on February’s / Sports Illustrated / swimsuit cover model— / . . . ”

Grand Mal can be frantic, it’s often funny, often strung out, yet the craft here never wavers. The poems hang together the way a talented musician knows to assemble dissonant chords, making them something powerful and profound that will move people, provided it’s done without strain or artifice. For many years Mahagin was a bass player and songwriter — no surprise! Music punches up each of his fractured poetic lines, so when they coalesce into lyrical scenes they move and shout and lament from that deep well in the land of the down and out: the almost dead; or dead for all practical purposes.

So why Grand Mal? Medically speaking, a grand mal seizure is characterized by 4 phases (there’s an epigraph — quoted from the Epilepsy Foundation of America– explaining each Phase, as it delineates the book’s 4 sections).

Mahagin writes in “Banishing the Snakes”:

“It’s a go-fast world, and green / is the color of my disease— / . . .  / I’ve done that / Riverdance sidestep, / caught the flak of dripping fang / that makes you so dreadful sick; / and I can tell you: no driftwood / wishbone stabbing stick at arms length / will work on this bitch it’s strictly up / close and personal, under your thumb / in a fire nozzle grip, until she opens wide, / blasting poison like syphilis piss / on a slush bank . . .” (from Phase 1).

Sub-dividing the book in this way allows the poems a forward momentum that tightens narrative tension, while at the same time maintaining the seizure as its driving metaphor. He writes in “Fare”:

“The Laotian impresario / at the outcall agency / recommended her / as a star in his stable: / “She go slow— she so / con-sooo-mate . . . pro.” / Now, as she slips on / the glistening condom / with her mouth / in a frisson of python, he bats back / the eyelid splash of rushing purple dusk / . . . ” (from Phase 2).

So what makes Mahagin run? Perhaps the demons of his past, present, and the always uncertain future, which is part and parcel of what makes poetry such a compelling art form. Some can channel these demons better than others. Mahagin puts it transparently out there, saying to anyone who happens to amble by, for a read:

“Stuff they give / to empty you / out, / makes sleep / tough, / getting up / to go, crapper / to sack , and back / . . . ” from “Endoscopy” (Phase 4).

Grand Mal is the second book by this prolific poet. I eagerly anticipate more.

Are You Brave Enough to Call the Body An Activism?

Are you strong enough to let go of your internalized ideation of gender, form, identity, and sexuality? Are you willing to become a provocation or become provoked by the pages of this book? Are you curious, do you have longing, are you ready to open yourself, to be the confidante we in my Trans by j/j hastain asks you to be?

Put aside for a moment any preconceived enculterated notions of the word ‘Trans’ because the use of that word here is different than historicized uses of it.  Instead, let go and travel with this writer into the world of a ‘’third city” where fulfillment is based in / from / toward a fulfillment through fucking.

I am talking about fucking as “merge,” as entry into the space of the beloved. This place where the primordial particles of the corporeal coalesce into a relentless ritual, a making holy of bodies, deeply in tune with their own pleasures, needs, desires and fullness, regardless of the manifesting shape or form.

In we in my Trans it’s not just the bodies, or form or fucking, that give this book its energy. It’s the enactment of a spaciousness that allows for all possibilities as in, “this is the act of craving” and “that the force of you in me / is the only thing that will bring my body to an openness / that is capable of knowing / human joy.”

This book of poems / ceremonies / erotics and love embodies the mythos of j/j hastain’s ritual city. It is a book about suture; the way reader, writer, and other intertwine. we in my Trans contains a relentlessness in de-defining a vessel (the body) of applied pressures. Pressures that require disassembling, (“wherein you affirm that you are in me / for always”) gestation, form / formlessness and “as an image / we are / continually reborning” exist simultaneously in the erotic urge of  hastain’s language.

I find power here, we in my Trans, is at once, “sensory portraiture / with its infinitely multiplying mysticisms” and also, an homage to the self discovering itself through / in another. I ache as a reader, wanting to find myself in the text, undone by words.

This is the essence of the “merge,” the coming together, in order to create an entirely new thing, “how two or more / in effort at harmony / will always make a harmonic.”

hastain is unabashed and honest about the ways sexuality / identity / gender and love become a chimera of myth and undulating text. The photos in the book are at once a punctuation and a window. There is no doubt that you are on a journey through a new type of landscape, with strange almost familiar shapes. You don’t expect to find rest in them and they serve as an extension of the text in its invocation to desire.

It’s a vulnerable subtlety to be involved in so intimate a text.  At times, you may ask yourself if you are turned on, or if you’ve become a voyeur. You may ask yourself where you end and the page begins. as I did. Whatever the answer, you will sleep with this book next to your bed and wake up dreaming it.